Posted
by
kdawson
on Sunday December 07, 2008 @02:17AM
from the panopticon-economy dept.

An anonymous reader writes in with an article from a Texas paper on the NSA's new facility in San Antonio. "America's top spy agency has taken over the former Sony microchip plant and is transforming it into a new data-mining headquarters... where billions of electronic communications will be sifted in the agency's mission to identify terrorist threats. ... [Author James] Bamford writes about how NSA and Microsoft had both been eyeing San Antonio for years because it has the cheapest electricity in Texas, and the state has its own power grid, making it less vulnerable to power outages on the national grid. He notes that it seemed the NSA wanted assurance Microsoft would be here, too, before making a final commitment, due to the advantages of 'having their miners virtually next door to the mother lode of data centers.' The new NSA facility is just a few miles from Microsoft's data center of the same size. Bamford says that under current law, NSA could gain access to Microsoft's stored data without even a warrant, but merely a fiber-optic cable." The article mentions the NRC report concluding that data mining is ineffective as a tactic against terrorism, which we discussed a couple of months back.

The article mentions the NRC report concluding that data mining is ineffective as a tactic against terrorismAnyone wanna bet that Obama won't do a damn thing about these obvious attempts to spy on American citizens?

The once Senator & future President has expressed a desire to shut down some of the most egregious abuses of power that Mr. Bush came up with. But the difference between Camp X-ray, warrantless wiretaps of phone calls, and monitoring of online traffic is a sliding scale of outrage - many more people care about Gitmo than about the wiretaps, and many more people care about the wiretaps than online monitoring. Like everything else in life, it's about ordering your priorities.

I agree, but let's not forget the system he had in place before the election and how that helped him. The first question I had after he was elected was what will he do with this massive communication system he has built? Seems he intends to keep using it, which I think is a step in the right direction.

I think he will, simply because stopping taxpayers money being funnelled into the pockets of his political enemies for no good reason if to his advantage.

Stopping some of the bizzare bits of security theatre is another thing. Stopping situations where security theatre has been used as an excuse to expand intelligence gathering into areas where it previously didn't go is yet another thing and would probably take a few administrations to find and stop. Think of Kennedy and the FBI and CIA of the time that w

I wasn't talking about the bailout, I was talking about the very large number of no-bid contracts to groups closely connected to Bush, Cheney etc. There are various others that are not so closely connected who would be the political enemies of anyone that decides to review spending.

At the moment there are scams where government money is spent to shift stuff to Iraq but the contractors then ship it the Syria to sell it.

You are putting words in my mouth that are not there. Personally I think even Palin would have been a vast improvement over the outgoing corrupt fake cowboy that wanted to be King and his bunch of escapees from Nixon's corrupt administration.

I think it will take a few terms of both Democrat and Republican Presidents to undo the damage.

I see. So what you're saying is that the one hand pushes us 5 toward authoritarianism and the other pulls us back 2 or 3. It seems to me that this has been going on since the 60s, or earlier. Frankly, I'm a bit tired of this arrangement, and would feel foolish for cheerleading the 2 steps back portion of the dance now that the pattern has been established so thoroughly.

America's top spy agency has taken over the former Sony microchip plant and is transforming it into a new data-mining headquarters

Sorry in advance, but I went ahead and read (some of) the article. Anyway, I'm having trouble believing for sure that this facility is a datacenter. Considering it's located at the site of a previous chip fab, it makes sense to me that it would stay a chip fab.

The only source that says this will be used for datamining isn't even the article author, but rather the author of a book who hasn't worked for the NSA for 25 years. These are quotes from this book:

No longer able to store all the intercepted phone calls and e-mail in its secret city, the agency has now built a new data warehouse in San Antonio, Texas," writes author James Bamford in the Shadow Factory, his third book about the NSA. "Costing, with renovations, upwards of $130 million, the 470,000-square-foot facility will be almost the size of the Alamodome. Considering how much data can now be squeezed onto a small flash drive, the new NSA building may eventually be able to hold all the information in the world."

So just what will be going on inside the NSA's new San Antonio facility? Bamford describes former NSA Director Mike Hayden's goals for the data-mining center as knowing "exactly what Americans were doing day by day, hour by hour, and second by second. He wanted to know where they shopped, what they bought, what movies they saw, what books they read, the toll booths they went through, the plane tickets they purchased, the hotels they stayed in... In other words, Total Information Awareness, the same Orwellian concept...

The new NSA facility is just a few miles from Microsoft's data center of the same size. Bamford says that under current law, NSA could gain access to Microsoft's stored data without even a warrant, but merely a fiber-optic cable.

What the Microsoft people will have will be just storage of a lot of the email that is being sent. They keep this email -- I don't know why -- and there should be some legislation saying how long it should be kept," said Bamford in a phone interview last week. "The post office doesn't keep copies of our letters when we mail letters; why should the telecom companies or the internet providers keep copies of our email? It doesn't make sense to me.

Given the history and function of the the NSA, it probably isn't going to be doing data mining, or anything else that they actually SAY it's going to be doing.

How's this for paranoia:

It's likely that the NSA cut a deal with Microsoft decades ago to allow a back door into any system running MS products. The Chinese now manufacture most of the computer hardware and are working to include hardware based, OS-independent back doors into as many systems as they can. Since a back door built into a chip is almost

very easy, but you have to use raw materials you personally acquire from local sources, weld them together in a large sphere in a tight grid pattern and to close the shape you'll have to finish the welding from inside. Best to complete the welding in complete silence away from any observers in a location that will remain secret.

Yes, the Chinese [wikipedia.org] certainly make a lot of computer hardware, but those aren't quite the chinese you were thinking of. Not to mention the Thai, the Singaporians, the Germans, even the French and the Americans who do also manufacture a lot of your computer parts.

A backdoor for the NSA in microsoft products is not unfathomable; if they were determined they'd do it. Then again, SELinux is funded by the NSA, so I don't quite know how that all fits in...

This is about catching other types of criminals like people distributing images of child sex, people discussing marijuana growing, people discussing anti-government ideas (i.e. like the LP), and so on. It's a way to circumvent the Constitution's requirement for a search warrant.

How about this: for every new monitoring scheme they setup they repeal a whole bunch of useless or minor laws. Presumably you'd want them repealing enough laws that very quickly they'd have to make fundamental choices about what to repeal or to stop monitoring and reach a sort of equilibreum.

A stupid pipe dream I know, bringing sanity into the world is frowned upon.

I don't think that the data mining will be dedicated on spying american citizens, since NSA is probably trying to spy the whole world electronically.Of course, american citizens will be the first victims, as usual.And this is called 'beta-testers' in Microsoft terminology;-)

Anyone wanna bet that Obama won't do a damn thing about these obvious attempts to spy on American citizens?

I find your paranoia (and that of many other Slashdotters) interesting. Why are so many Americans so certain that everything their government does is an attempt to oppress them? NSA's mission is foreign intelligence. That means that most of what they do is about spying on people who are not American citizens. Believe it or not, the world out here is really quite big. Did you know that there are actually more non-Americans than Americans on the Internet? There's plenty of non-American data for NSA to mine, if data mining is what they want to do.

You are not the centre of the universe. You are not the only thing your government cares about. You are not being spied on with satellite mind-control rays. Get over yourselves and drop the conspiracy crap, please.

Or, you know, go and collect loads of guns and hole yourself up in a log cabin in the mountains while you wait for the Rapture. They can't eavesdrop on your communications if you're only communicating with the Lord!

"Why are so many Americans so certain that everything their government does is an attempt to oppress them?""Why are so many Canadians so certain that everything their government does is an attempt to oppress them?""Why are so many Brits so certain that everything their government does is an attempt to oppress them?""Why are so many Aussies so certain that everything their government does is an attempt to oppress them?""Why are so many...."
Because they swap data, personally that hardly makes me ce

Hehe... I concur. Also the NSA just wants to see how many secrets the Vatican has stolen from the US. Among them are technical nuclear weapons documents that the Roman Catholic Church used to steer the outcome of wars! NSA = Prevent the Rapture... CONSPIRACY!!!
http://www.exposingsatanism.org/illuminati-vatican-cia-documents.htm [exposingsatanism.org]
I crack me up!

...given that there is so much NON American data out there, and this country is reeling from a collapsing economy, it might be more cost effective to spy domestically for foreign threats. Some of the more effective acts of terror were committed by people RIGHT HERE AT HOME, occasionally with foreign financing. No, we're not the center of the universe, and because we are not, it is cheaper for our government to violate our civil rights within our borders in order to increase our perception of "security". Any

I find it interesting that the linked "article" is actually an opinion piece from an "alternative newsweekly". It makes a lot of assumptions and unwarranted logical leaps; long on paranoia and short on facts. In any event, here's bit of history, with the important parts in bold. I doubt many people will be interested in what the leaders

The problem is that according to testimony by engineers at the co-operating telecom facilities, the surveillance technology intercepts all traffic, not just requested traffic. So the NSA is intercepting domestic communications between citizens of no interest, without a warrant. That is in direct violation of the law. Develop a system that intercepts only the communications of interest, obtain a warrant for those streams that need it, and all will be will. Continue the dragnet approach and people will continue, rightfully, to protest the crime.

That's an impressive response. Almost half your response is a straw man though, as I never made any statements about foreign surveillance. I never objected to foreign surveillance, just domestic surveillance which doesn't meet warrant requirements. So basically our only disagreement is where that requirement begins.

I don't care whether Mr. Klein knows the workings of the NSA equipment or not. And neither should you. As testified, all communication is being routed through the equipment. Refute that. Don't

The trouble, of course, is what it means to "intercept". If "intercept" simply means "passes through any equipment even if the meaningful, contextual content of excluded traffic is never read, analyzed, searched, or stored in any way", then yes, all traffic under such provisions is being "intercepted". Except that's not what intercepted means in a legal context. By that same logic, since any telephone company has the technical capability to tap any phone number for a law enforcement entity, they are, in effect, "tapping" all of them.

That is not the same logic at all. The difference between passing communications on phone company wires, and recording communications in NSA data warehouses for possible later analysis, just in case, is obvious and pertinent.

Sure, you can argue that this is government equipment, and that you don't know what it's doing.

No, you can't see what it's doing, nor can any court (save, perhaps, FISC); that would disable the entire notion of secret foreign intelligence collection (which does not require, and never has required, court oversight when US Persons are not involved). That's where Congressional intelligence oversight comes in, and that's the whole purpose of it being there. Intelligence is a difficult balance in a free and open society.

What's difficult to balance? Al Qaida didn't just learn that we'd like to intercept their phone calls because the New York Times ran a story that the NSA, under the direction of the Bush administration, was breaking federal law. Just what tactical advantage to terrorists supposedly o

If any business needs yet another reason to stay away from SaaS, this is the one to pay attention to.

Businesses and their IP are becoming increasingly important. Any time your business IP crosses onto someone elses network, it's susceptible to snooping either by corporate espionage or now government eyes.

If your company has a market advantage caused by proprietary information, SaaS is not for you. Why else would the NSA be shacking up next to a Microsoft data center?

I wouldn't be too concerned with your business-confidential data leaking into the private sector via some unscrupulous NSA employee (who have a higher bar to employment I would hope, than say a TSA employee).

I'm much more concerned about the NSA collecting data about foreign nationals who happen to be using whichever SaaS app they happen to be snooping, and that's ontop of all the feature creep that could end up being used to abuse US citizens.

I wouldn't be too concerned with your business-confidential data leaking into the private sector via some unscrupulous NSA employee (who have a higher bar to employment I would hope, than say a TSA employee).

"Rogue" agents are not the problem. Sanctioned industrial espionage is the problem.

In theory they only do it against foreign corporations, but as multinationals become the norm, that line is becoming increasingly less meaningful. The ultimate result of such policies is likely to be spying against the competitors of the currently favored multinationals.

"Rogue" agents are not the problem. Sanctioned industrial espionage is the problem

You got that right. Here is another "small" example - to the tune of 6 billion, with a 1.3 billion side show - all old news:

July 11, 2001: European Parliament Report: Echelon Data Provided to US CorporationsGlyn Ford.Glyn Ford. [Source: British Labour Party]The European Parliament releases its final report on its findings about the secretive US surveillance program known as Echelon. The report, two years in the making, exhaustively details many of Echelon's surveillance capabilities, and lists many of Echel

This may or may not be relevant but government personnel have a really cavalier attitude towards corporate IP. It's an extension of how they look down upon the vendors and contractors who actually make most government operations "work." I recently had a customer get pretty ugly when I refused to give him software he hadn't licensed (just because I can get license-free versions of anything my company produces)...they expect "hookups" all the time, and you just know they will throw that shit up on the torre

Any time your business IP crosses onto someone elses network, it's susceptible to snooping either by corporate espionage or now government eyes.

I'm not sure your business critical data is the real risk. Like a lot of things, it's the unintended consequences that may have bigger implications. If other countries are afraid of communications flowing through US relays being monitored, whether that fear is legitimate or not, they may be tempted to utilize more advanced encryptions schemes or develop relays that don't route through the US.

Sort of like the laptop confiscations by TSA. Some companies stopped coming here to do business. That probably wasn't the only reason, but for a few it was the last straw. Those that did come were sudden converts to advanced encryption and off-site file storage.

I think there's a certain level of trust that used to be there that the US could be trusted with your data because no one could access it without a warrant. Probably not the protection they imagined but still a reasonable assurance. Take that away and nothing really separates us from the most heavy-handed and tyrannical governments on the planet.

Ultimately, I think that's the greatest blow to the US from the 6 years of right wing rule. The realization that another Bush could rise up and trample on our ideals and flout the law with little real consequence and even get enthusiastic support from a substantial minority of the population. Suddenly nothing is beneath us. Spying on friend and foe alike, unilateral military action, seizure of bank funds and property without due process, indefinite imprisonment without access to a lawyer, torture, racial profiling...nothing is out of bounds if we feel the justification is there. We can no longer be trusted to respect the rule of law. A perception we have, unfortunately, worked hard to deserve.

The realization that another Bush could rise up and trample on our ideals and flout the law with little real consequence and even get enthusiastic support from a substantial minority of the population.

Substantial minority? You mean a 50.001% minority? (Or a 49.999% minority if you thought Gore should have won?) For most of his time in office Bush had a great deal of the country behind him (just maybe not your circle of friends).

The thing that scares me about Bush is that a MAJORITY of Americans supporte

The problem is that the majority of Americans believe in authoritarian government. They might disagree as to some details of policy that this government should enact, but just about everybody agrees that it shouldn't be up to people to run their own lives.

A lot of us had pretty vague ideas about how a lot of things, including government, ought to work. I'm optimistic about the likelihood of general understanding and appreciation of civics to improve at an accelerated pace, once the alcoholic in the Oval Office is replaced by the Constitutional law scholar.

Normally, that structure implies that you believe the opposite, an assumption that I do not believe is reasonable. Consider the Bush administration's recent, blatant preferential treatment toward businesses which, paraphrasing Michael Moore, acquire money purely by already having money, producing nothing. Contrast Bernanke's and Paulson's, "emergency relief" largesse to the financial professions against their absolute refusal to loan 1/10th what AIG has already received, to save 3 million automobile manuf

America's top spy agency has taken over the former Sony microchip plant and is transforming it into a new data-mining headquarters - oddly positioned directly across the street from a 24-hour Walmart - where billions of electronic communications will be sifted in the agency's mission to identify terrorist threats.

The US will never do anything to dislodge Microsoft from the throne. The intelligence value of having Microsoft products in a monopolistic position all over the world is far too important. You don't squander that just to please some customer rights hippies at home.

Google has REQUIRED the feds to obey the laws. MS actively works with all govs. for example, the case of the chinese author who was jailed because Yahoo was used; Supposedly, China gov actually had used BOTH Yahoo and MS, but choose to put info about yahoo because MS was closer to the gov. MS has ZERO issues about ignoring the constitution or any rights as long as they get theirs.

MSIE getting a button on the toolbar that says "Report as Terrorist site"

And MSN Hotmail getting a new link next to contacts that says "report contact as terrorist.

Also, the list of possible threat sources was just expanded to include slashdot.

Rumor has it that certain editors of slashdot and other blogs may be conducting attacks against various industry players by linking to them ( something the terrorists call "Slashdotting" the victim site)

Sony wasn't there that long. They got it from AMD. Anway, the NSA has been "moving in" for more than a year. It was almost a fort before, and it certainly is now. They even taken over the public road that ran to its north. I'm on the hill, about a mile northwest of there, and can see and hear it at night. It's also close to the Southwest Research Institute (they did the Columbia wing test that demonstrated the hole could be caused by the foam insulation), which is on the other side of Loop 410. I'm sort of surprised they moved in there, though. Lots of better places farther out. San Antonio used to have five military bases: Fort Sam Houston, Lackland AFB, Kelly AFB, and the smaller Brooks field, and Randolf AFB (nearby). Kelly and Brooks are gone. AT&T used to be headquartered here but most of it moved to Dallas earlier this year (think of room 614a). Mm, maybe that's why AT&T left - NSA was moving in.

I was Googling to see if other company HQs of interest were in the area and came across the AT&T one. It seems that the major pipe AT&T was probably using before wouldn't be too hard to be had. Seemed the timing a bit too convenient.

I'm gonna piggy back on your post since your a fellow resident from SA.:)

I can't believe the paranoia based on a college kids report in the local flea rag? Come on. The SA Current is is local college rag, they advertise current events, gay clubs, have the worst food critics, and have the most left learning articles this side of San Francisco. The first paragraph in the article is total BS, there are either no NSA employees or a skeleton crew at that facility. Its still under construction, and I highly doub

How are your math skills? One of the top in nation? NSA wants you. If you want a job doing sysadmin, then you can work for one of the big gov. contractors and they will put you in various locations. Of course, you will need top secret clearance.

The good news is that this datacenter is just ONE of their many. I am surprised that this news got out.

People are used to organized crime, but terrorism is a relatively new concept in America; people are more afraid of Al Qaeda than they are of the Hell's Angels, so fighting terrorism takes priority.
I'm not saying it's the right way to look at things, but that's the way most Americans do.

During the civil war the slaves developed a method of communication that went unnoticed except by those who knew about it.They would sing song in the fields that woudl help to spread the word regarding teh undrground railroad.

Today common conversation communication can as well be used where there really is not anything to decipher.Language and its abstraction work by attaching meaning and only work as well as the argeed upon meaning by those using teh abstraction.It doesn't matter what meaning is attached so long as those using it understand what is being communicated

Everyone has heard of double speak, where what is communicated is meant to be perceived by the public one way but internally the very same words mean the opposite of what the public perceives. and this is just one example.

There is a saying, "locks as for honest people" meaning here if some dishonest group wanted to communicate without concern for NSA data mining, they could do so easily.

However, considering the massive amounts of data that is transfered from voice to digital on a daily or hourly basis and what the limits we have in computing power, its simple not possible to data mine for the terrorist threats from terrorists who want to avoid exposure and use such common conversation meaning dishonesty.

But it is very possible, very probable, and very reliable that such data mining be used to determine the attitudes of mass population mindsets and mindsets of population sections as well as spying on targeted US citizens that might influence such population in a direction counter to the "why determine the populations mindset and changes in it?" The unsuspecting American public is so easily influenced by the media so by knowing the overall attitudes of the American public and using the media to influence American attitudes, you have a feedback loop of CONTROL.

To properly address terrorist threats is to simply remove the reasons any terrorist group could play off of, that they won't be able to gain a following.

The World Trade Center was attacked on two different dates. The NSA had to know it was a target and why.It was because of the effects of the trillion dollar bet [pbs.org] in south East Asia. Even Ted Turner publicly said 9/11 was an act of desperation and he'd know because his CNN News did a story on the effects as did also ABC. Follow the Money is the reality here.

This was avoidable but caused by greed. And on the other hand there is What The World Wants [unesco.org] that shows that we do have the manpower, knowledge and not only the natural resources but the finances to remove reasons for terrorists to gain a following. And even more important, the question of: Why is this not being done?

Given the death and torture imposed upon innocent people during the Spanish inquisition and the fact Galileo was exonerated so very very late (1992 where it only really was to serve the church not this innocent but long dead person) and the fact that Indonesia by CIA records is 88% Muslim, its clear that religion is an excuse both ways. An excuse to use by the bad, be the bad being believers or non-believers. But 9/11 was about money, wrongful World Stock Market manipulations backed by political controlled military, hence the Pentagon and probable White house targets. It was about money not religion, regardless of what you call such evil dishonesty as happened in the stock market.

But if you wanted to get a very accurate view of the general population attitudes for such a media feedback loop of CONTROL , then what the NSA is doing with data mining will clearly work.

Construction on the new NSA facility (old Sony bldg) started long before MS had finalized work to build the data center in San Antonio. The two are not related in anything other than the fact that they are both in San Antonio; it's not like they can walk over to MS Datacenter with a thumb drive and ask for all their data. It's _just_ a datacenter; coordination between MS and NSA would likely happen in Washington or Redmond.

There are other datacenters in the Westover Hills part of San Antonio; Lowes (or Ho

Yes, well, the problem is that to be accurate you would have to also let "etc" = 100% legal statuses including political opponent, personal rival, and superior inventor, especially in a field with government-sponsored monopolies like telecomms and passenger transportation. Yes, government-sponsored monopolies, in the form of exclusive telecomms franchises and direct subsidies to oil companies, and farm corporations to burn food, are all hi

So proximity to a satellite office of Microsoft is irrefutable evidence? Do you think that if the NSA wanted on your computer that doing it with any other OS would be that big of challenge?

Come one, you can do better than that. Ask yourself why the NSA would care about your computer? Doing something illegal? No, then they don't care about you. Yes, well, you may have to take your medicine.

Using the incompetence of George Walker Bush and Donald Rumsfeld, almost everybody is talented enough to suspect these losers are cheating us. Surveillance is just one possible means. Handing auto workers', and everybody else's income who works for a living, directly to their cronies at AIG and Citi is another, and the latter is a documented fact. Suspicion of other, similar pursuits of the same agenda via other agencies is not paranoia, it's true intelligence. As opposed to the euphemistic language inv

Microsoft will even pay for the fiber optic cable if the NSA will share the intel with them, so they can rip their customers off even more than they do.

They already let the NSA try to break Vista when it was being developed - meaning that the NSA probably found ten ways to break into Vista machines, then shared seven of them with Microsoft and kept the other three to themselves.

What will Obama do with the prisoners? Answer: turn them over to military prisons in the US - where they'll get the exact same treatment they got in Guantanamo.

Or he'll turn them over to the US Bureau of Prisons - where they'll get the exact same treatment they got in Guantanamo - just like US prisoners do.

Where do you think all these brutal methods were developed - in US prisons. Most of the people involved in the Iraq Abu Ghraib abuses were US correctional officers. The Iraqi prison system was developed b

What the article doesn't say is that the NSA leased the former Sony site in 2005, with plans to locate as many as 6,000 employees at the site. It had scaled back those plans in 2006, but then decided to build a data center on the property in 2007 [datacenterknowledge.com]. Microsoft's project certainly confirmed San Antonio's qualities as a data center site, but it's not really a case of the NSA following Microsoft.